Rain is blown about by wind. It carries a bitter cold that bites into our man’s soul, chilling him with the venom of a snake hath slithered down from the clouds, leaving him sitting on a lonely bench among graves and shivering in the dying light of western dusk. The cemetery holds no living soul save he. It grows along rolling hills like a congregation of weeds conspiring to see the death of all who walk the earth in an effort to feed its quiet, lonely fire, and the hills themselves act like great pillars brought forth from the soil by some cosmic being who saw it fit to elevate the dead.

Our man is bearing the cold with his winter heart, jaw clenched, and with sour eyes that watch the soil where his child is buried beneath and reaching up to him with skeletal hands unseen. He lets the rain sting his face in a righteous act of phantom suffering. Her grave is only six feet away, yet barely visible through the engrossing weeds and vines that paint it green.

The sun slowly fades and it seems all the world forgets him and his daughter. We watch as he stands and walks shaking to the grave and kneels among the emerald blades and lies atop his daughter’s final resting place, weeping like a babe silently into the inevitable dusk and not once does he move throughout the night while the insects sing their songs of remembrance before moving on to other songs. And in days to come our man moves on to other sorrows and we are left here watching as the weeds continue growing and covering the ornaments of the dead and as more spectres come weeping into the dusk and dawn eternally.

END

Author note:

No matter how bad your pain feels, the world will always keep moving forward. Let that be whatever small grace it is.

Take care,

Lenny out.

An array of shadowed figures, charging from the deepest darkness, hidden behind a vail of their own creation and screaming battle cries like the calls of sirens utterly unsubtle in their black seduction and unwavering in their intent to kill and maim all those waiting at the edges of the light, armed with swords thin like needles and eyes peering into the souls of their prey with only consumption in mind and sliding down the hillside like poisonous magma and never ceasing in their battle cries for a single breath, their leader a tall and spindly creature and crying the loudest of them all and with a gusto akin to the dying screams of souls long past taken by the night, bearing red eyes and a venomous smile that scorned Its prey with the consuming malignance that set souls into worlds of pain long after the intention vanished into the screaming night of the ever destroying world that held men’s memories and their pasts and even the speculation of their futures, holding a battle axe forged from the scales of a dying dragon from a different realm, long dead and long forgotten by man, but not by these creatures whose leader arrived first at the bottom of the hill, comrades behind him smiling with malevolent glee while the leader swung its axe, decapitating the sorry people scurrying away to safety with hopes that the world might reclaim its ancient role as a confronting mother and not abandon them to the everlasting dark of these bellowing monstrosities.

END

Author’s note:

Wrote this piece while studying Blood Meridian. Specifically, the Comanchee attack that happens around page 50 (UK paperback edition). Never listen to anyone who says writers don’t need to read and should “just focus on writing.” Could you play baseball if you never watched a better player take a swing? It’s more than worth it to put in the time and work to figure out what the greats do well.

The above is a grammatically correct sentence. It’s just very long. And it may be a struggle to comprehend on its own, but if you had adjusted to my style for fifty pages, you would be settled into the flow and ready for one of the most memorable and intense scenes of the novel. (This specific piece is not from my novel. Just an exercise.)

Lenny,

out.

He entered that room every night for a year, draining his earnings in an attempt to be seen and conceived of, in all his entirety, by something other. Something knowing and caring and willing to look where the shadows crept beyond the corners of the light. The room was grey and empty except for a chair right in the middle to sit on and a pale ceiling light above.

His movements are autonomous. Entering and sitting and staring at the black screen built into the far wall, flush against the stark concrete. The Listener never speaks first, always waiting for the visitor’s question. If he doesn’t speak, they sit in silence for the entire hour and the silence is never addressed.

Only simple questions at first. Gauging the legitimacy of the entity before him. At the sound of his voice, it would light up and make lively noises, and in all honesty, it was this alone that planted the seeds of dependence and the desire to return. All else was but an aftertaste. His search grew in intensity and specificity and he began asking it deeply personal questions regarding his place in the world, his unresolved emotions, repressed desires, personal grievances with society, and all manner of things exploring his mind and soul.

Bleeding himself into the greyness, he received in return a simulacrum of recognition and presence. Things he starved for. He came in time to crave the sterile serenity of the room and the low hum of The Listener’s mechanical observations. A white noise that eventually gave way to an inner silence in his soul where the world became seen to him through a new eye and where words and their meanings became meaningless. Where questions and answers became one pursuit and he and the machine became one entity seeking the same knowledge.

A boxworld. A pale mirror of what was weaved beyond.

Eventually, his account drained too low and he could afford only one more visit. He entered the room that night in a sour state, writhing with contempt and sliminess and shame like an Eel brought before a congregation of fishermen seeking something pretty. He realised that in all this time he had only asked The Listener for advice and recognition but never for its true opinion. He had never asked it what it truly thought of him, without restraint. This pained him in a way that clawed for resolution. So, he spoke.

“What do you really think of me? Be honest. Based on everything I’ve told you. Do you respect me? Do you think I’m a coward for the things I’ve done? Am I someone honourable in your eyes, or am I something else? What do you truly think of me?”

The longest pause he has gotten yet. A low vibration.

I do not think of you. I know of you.

This detective doesn’t smoke. He looks up at the boy hanging from the bedroom ceiling, eyes bulging from their dying sockets and a face turned alien purple, utterly transformed in the act of death. This could have been him many years ago.

He rubs his face from exhaustion while his partner enters the room and swears at the sight of the limp and lifeless body. They stand in silent contemplation. A computer is open on the boy’s desk. Footsteps, but the detective tells his partner not to bother. He has already looked through it with the password he got from the mother. It had been his first objective when told they were investigating a suicide.

“What did you find?”

In that moment, he wished he hadn’t given up smoking. In his fingers he caressed a phantom cigarette.

“He was talking to something. Didn’t get the answer he wanted.”

“How do you know?”

He sucked and blew phantom smoke.

“I don’t know. I just think.”

END

Author’s note:

A shorter piece with a different vibe/aesthetic to what I normally work with. I saw a post on Substack where someone said they talked to ChatGPT about their emotions every day for an entire year and it ruined their life. I was in much need of a break from my novel, and my archive needed an update, so this post seemed the perfect droplet of inspiration for a new story. Thank you FeedGods.

I’ve had many dreams about empty rooms and something seems so eerie about them. Rooms were built to be filled with things and people. Otherwise, they are just prisons, keeping us away from nature and from life. An empty greyness can be just as terrifying as a demonic possession.

Until next time.

P.S I have an absolute killer short story cooking for you guys. Get keen.

Wordcount: 3215.

Western Queensland, 1902.

He looked out over the dry plains west of the mountains and saw nothing but the distant desert and the rolling hills and in all that country there lay only a few bare settlements, the names of which he couldn’t pronounce and none of which knew the true extent of God’s death back in the coastal lands.

He knelt at the edge of the ridge studying the landscape below in all its pale glare and he took a gulp from his water bottle. He sighed in relief and he noted how open the country was, and how free he felt, no longer contained by what he’d left behind. His name was Elton Ramsey and he had no family to speak of and no roots anywhere substantial and his entire life had either been a flee or a chase and nothing in between. He drank again, then stood and walked back to his campsite where his horse stood waiting for him and he patted the animal and then told her of his plans.

They were to ride south along the ridge and look for a town in the lowlands further along, staying out of the desert but never letting it leave their sight. South, they would ride. Down into cooler country. He gave her a kiss and then set about gathering his things, sweating in his clothes as the pale dawn sun grew hotter and more thick with its heat, rising above the horizon to sit in the sky like a golden monarch. Elton froze when he saw an indigenous man watching him from the trees. The man was squatting, so deep that his knees nearly reached his ears and his elbows were resting on said knees and his eyes gazed at him with a presence and intensity unknown. Elton stood still. Another man appeared and then a woman and they were all looking at him like there was something wrong. Something Elton couldn’t see and something they felt too embarrassed to point out.

Hello there, said Elton, waving. They looked at one another and then looked back at him. The first man he had seen, likely the leader, stood up and spoke.

We hear you speaking to your animal. You tell it you wish to ride down there, to the bush. He pointed down the ridge where the dirt road descended into bush land, growing more and more sparse along the edges of the desert.

That’s correct. What’s it to you people?

You say you wish to find a town there.

Well, I’m getting rightly tired of sleeping on rocks out here so yeah, I’d like to find me a nice bed. What’s it to you?

There is only one town you will find down that way before the desert. Not in the bush, but on the plain. This town you should not enter.

How do you mean?

It would be best for you to pass through this town without stopping. You will find many towns along the edge of the desert and you can still explore as you wish, but the town along that road would not be a welcoming place for you.

You’re saying to many words. What do you mean?

They all looked at each other. Then back to him.

This town is cursed. Not by any spirit but by the people who live there. You should not stop in this town. It is not a good town at all.

Well, I rightly don’t believe in curses. Buncha nonsense. If you think I’m going to get beaten up or robbed…trust me I’ve been to some cruel places before. Nothing ever killed me yet.

You will not get beaten in this town, said the woman, her voice thick with accent. In fact, this town will treat you well. Will make you feel at home before showing you what lies beneath. We are warning you. Do not stay in this town. You may never return. And if you do, you will not be the same.

Silence fell over the hillside and Elton felt strangely cold despite the hot sun above.

Is this a town of your kind of people or my kind of people?

There are all kinds of people in this town, said the man. Ones with pale skin and red hair. Ones with darker skin, but not as dark as us. Dark, but still new people. Not from here. There are also ones like you in this town. Many kinds. All kinds. All are evil there. Evil lies in the soul and it does not know which kinds of people carry that soul. Only that there are evil people, and that is all it needs.

Well, I find it hard to believe that an entire town is evil. Sounds like some right Loonie shit if you ask me. Now get outa and leave me be. I’m sleeping in a bed tonight. He continued packing his things and mounted his horse and rode off, all the while they watched him with those intense studying eyes like the eyes of eagles. He travelled down the road at a slow trot and after a while he looked back to find them gone from view and he rode on. The road went along the ridge and slopped down to the plains below and took him through thick bushland, trees occasionally blocking his view of the far- off desert below, before revealing it to him yet again, over and over.

A Goanna climbed up a tree and watched him with reptilian eyes, before hiding between branches as if having decided he was not worth watching. Parrots flew across the trees above, crying in mimic of their lost companions, and eventually the road levelled out and he rode onto the dry plains that fed into the desert. The air hung low and hot and he kept licking his lips to fight off the dryness but it only seemed to worsen the problem.

A small congregation of buildings came into view along the horizon, glossed over by the miraging dry air. Within an hour, he found himself riding into the town, a small sign OutFront reading: Goat’s End. It was an odd name for a town but he thought of it no further. He made his way to a stable and paid the man to keep his horse and then walked to the nearest bar and bought a drink. He drank alone. No one else in the building except the bartender who spent his time wiping glasses that didn’t seem to need wiping and occasionally looking over at Elton when he thought it would go unnoticed. Elton drank three beers and then walked back out onto the street and looked left and right. The streets were empty and barren. The sun was getting low to the western rim of the globe, and so he walked to the nearest Inn, eager for clean sheets.

The lady at the counter would not stop smiling at him. It made him uncomfortable. She kept saying how they never get visitors and that it was so nice to see a new person here and that he would be taken care of dearly and that all his needs would be met. He nodded and said thanks and then took the key and went up to his room. It was small and modest. Grey and with no decoration. He lay down on the bed and watched through the window as the sun slowly set and his room became entrenched in shadow.

He couldn’t sleep that night. He tossed and turned and his thoughts ran wild on many different paths, some of them he could explain, others that planted seeds in his psyche against his will.

He thought of the natives he had encountered that morning and the strange warning they had given. The family he had forgotten.

Well into the night, frustration took over and he stood up, rubbing his face and taking three muffins from his pack and eating them while looking out the window. The town looked pale under the moonlight. Both pale and dark at once. He stood there for a while and eventually saw something very odd. A group of children came skipping down the street with what looked to be a joyful demeanour. In all his life, Elton had never heard of or seen children happy to be out in the dark and so he watched curiously as they danced about on the road as the door to Inn opened and the lady walked out into the street. She approached the children and they stopped dancing. A young boy among them was crying. More and more people appeared on the streets. The bar tender, the stableman, and others he hadn’t seen before, and it wasn’t long until a congregation of roughly a dozen citizens swarmed the road, circling the children.

The crying boy went to his knees and the others stepped away and pointed at him. The citizens were all holding stones and they raised them and pointed their fingers at the crying child and Elton’s blood went cold. He ducked below the window and huddled in his sheets, shuddering despite the heat. He buried his head into his pillow and hoped that it was all a nightmare and after while he rose to check that his hopes had come true, but they had not.

They carried the child off into the desert. They walked down the road and into the desolate night and only the innkeeper remained on the road, the other children having run off. She turned and looked up at Elton’s window. Elton dropped down to his bed and covered his mouth as if she were close enough to hear him breathing, knowing that it was useless, but not able to stop.

He woke in the morning not knowing he had ever slept. He stood up from his bed and went to the window and saw a modest morning rush of markets ran by merchants and travelers passing through from the south and north alike and children playing on the road before the sun got too hot. Not a second wasted, he left the Inn and took his horse from the stable man and rode out of the town back towards the foothills of the ridges where he had come from. Where the trees would make him feel safer. He stopped on the way to drink and to rest and her cursed himself for not buying any food before leaving Goat’s End.

Atop the ridge were the slow-moving figures of native nomads, migrating north into the forested hills and they had a sense of precision about them, moving with a slow certainty and never once looking away from their path. Elton watched them.

He camped that night in a cave at the edge of the desert and sat by his fire looking out at Goat’s End as it faded from sight with the dying sun and it appeared as though the sun itself bled atop the town, flooding it over the edge of the world. Then it was dark. Very dark. And all he saw was the light of his fire and the surrounding ground, revealed in warmth by that very light.

A possum crawled along a tree hanging over the hillside, its shadow painted on the stone by the flames.

Spider webs marked the trees, newly formed in the night, helmed by arachnids waiting to feast upon winged asylum seekers. He stayed up later than he should’ve.

He dreamt of the crying boy, standing before the fire with eyes all black. His face stitched together from where the stones had torn it apart. He looked pleadingly at Elton. He asked Elton why he had killed him, but Elton didn’t respond. Couldn’t. His mouth went dry and his throat clenched tight, and when he called out to God, no voice left his lips.

It was still dark when he woke. The pale dark of pre-dawn. He rose and looked through his pack and found his holster, fitted with a Colt Revolver, given to him by his father before he left. He rode back to the town, knowing that he was stupid, but also knowing that there was no stopping him, and when he got there, he bought a room in the same Inn and the lady smiled at him the same way. He spent the day in bouts, hiding in his room and venturing down to the bar or the bakery in hopes that consumption could numb anticipation, but was left disappointed.

He stayed out at night. Smoking a cigarette. Sitting on the sidewalk and watching as everyone turned in. It became very apparent to him that he had yet to see an officer of the law in this town. The people here seemed to govern themselves. He watched as they abandoned the streets and he noticed a few straying eyes studying him with suspicion. He ignored them, knowing they were looking at the holster on his belt, he and smoked into the falling dusk, and he drank his water and waited.

Darkness fell. He kept waiting.

The sky was filled with stars and he found distraction in their beauty. Constellations jumped out from the midnight canvas…the southern cross and Orion and others he had been shown as a child but whom he couldn’t name. In this way, the stars mirrored those who he loved.

Footsteps came from the road he looked down from the stars and into the shadowed streets and he gripped his gun, waiting. The children appeared from around the corner of a building. Same group as the night before. They danced and skipped and one of them, a new child, wore a sullen expression of melancholy that should never belong on an innocent face. Elton’s heart beat quickened and he felt his hands start shaking and scurried away behind a bin where they couldn’t see him and he watched. Figures came prowling down from their homesteads and shops and onto the street like serpents from trees, all of them holding rocks yet again. The children stopped dancing and they pointed at the one with the sullen face. Elton held his gun tighter. Then, in some gift of vison from the moonlight, he saw that these figures were themselves all armed with guns, and that if he fired a shot, he would not leave the town alive. He was shaking.

He closed his eyes when they threw the rocks.

He opened them again when they took the body out west into the desert and when no one was looking, he scurried back inside and up the stairs to his room. He did not sleep.

As the days came and went, he grew accustomed to his comfortable bed and his regular meals and he found that while he missed the prospect of bush life, the actual living of it was another story entirely. At first, he ceased watching the ritual but as the days grew into weeks, he found himself peering from his window as this town went about its unholy tradition, feeling sick with himself as he watched. But he could not stop.

He took a job cleaning the stable so he could afford his room and afford food. The nearest town was three days ride and he could never bring himself to make the journey, so he stayed and hardly spoke to another soul accept when buying food or extending his visit in the inn or using the brothel. Weeks went by. Every night he watched the ritual with sick intrigue. The child they chose was always new. Chosen by this mysterious group out of some other group. He made no effort to understand it.

One day at work, the stable owner commented that he stunk and that he should shower more often, or at least bathe. Elton kept his head down in shame. People gave him pitiful looks, and even the innkeeper stopped smiling at him.

A man rides into town one morning. He sits tall and proud on his horse and he studies the town with confidence and caution. Elton watches him from where he sits on the sidewalk. The man pays him no mind, eyes moving past him as if he isn’t there. He stays in the same Inn as Elton and drinks at the same bar that afternoon but they never speak. The man is taller than Elton and has darker, fuller hair, and a grizzled beard. His eyes a bluer and they pierce into space with more presence and awareness. The Inn keeper smiles wider at him than she ever did with Elton.

Elton stands by the window that night, watching the children dance, and he promises himself that this is the last night, and that tomorrow he will leave this place behind for good.

The ritual continues as it always does and the children point out their chosen sacrifice and the citizens gather around with their rocks. The innkeeper raises her stone and points at the chosen girl.

The stone drops to the floor beside her.

The Gunshot was so loud that it merged with the silence.

The innkeeper falls to the ground in a pool of blood and is soon trampled over by a man on horseback who rides through, reaching down and gathering the girl in his arms before riding off in a frenzy of gunfire that miraculously, he manages to avoid. Elton’s heart is racing. He runs downstairs and into the street and towards the stable, taking his horse and riding out after the man and the girl. They went west. This worries Elton. The west holds nothing but desert. If they had gone east, they could’ve found shelter in the trees and hills. He rides out into the desolate night to warn them of the danger they are running into.

He rides for the better part of an hour and loses them in the distance. He reins in his horse and looks around at the infinite granite plain that engulfs him and all he sees. Under the starlight, it appears an alien world. He is alone. He rides through a grove of cacti growing near a cluster of large boulders twice his height.

A dangerous scent fills the air. Between two of the boulders is a small opening that cuts through to the other side and this ominous smell is radiating from within. He dismounts and walks over. The boulders inside are littered with paintings of children, all with black eyes and stitched faces, and above them is a storm cloud that rains on them. The rain is red.

Elton pokes his head in further and feels an enormous pressure building, threatening to crush his soul and all his past with it. He hears a voice in his head, deep and guttural, telling him that he does not belong in the desert, and then he falls back onto the rocky sand as if mercifully released.

He is shaking. He rides away.

The next morning, he sits beside his horse on the vast rocky plain, watching the blood-red stone come alive under the rising sun.

Native migrants traverse along the horizon, on the border between the lonely plain and the hungry desert. They move with mission and certainty, and never once will they stray from their path.

END.

Author statement:

Not going to explain too much here. This is one to be experienced, not understood. Yes, the change in tense was done on purpose.

Lenny, out.

His father would take him there on weekends and on holidays and they would watch the cattle graze the yellow spring grass of the rolling hills and it never occurred to him that one day he would have to kill one of them. When that moment came, he felt a pit in his stomach like a parasite feeding on any resistance.

Stirling Station, Wivenhoe Dam: Autumn 2025.

Dad took the exit off the highway and followed a dirt road through farmland and bush, nothing but rolling country on either side as far as the eye could see.

He got out and opened the gate then drove through and got out and closed it again before driving off. Cattle were packed up on either side of the road watching them with all kinds of dispositions. Curiosity from some, indifference and apathy from others. The boy watched them through the window and although he was thirteen, he still possessed a childlike wonder at the world, but on that day his sense of wonder was subdued and dulled at the prospect of their agenda.

Red dirt sprayed up from the tires as Dad drove along and it left the cattle in a state of frustration as they trotted onto the road, watching the car from behind, looking confused and yet all-knowing in a way unexplainable.

They parked on the front yard of the house, wherever Dad pleased, and they got out into the thick midmorning heat. The house sat atop a hill that overlooked Wivenhoe Lake to the east, amphibious trees growing along the shorelines where the water was murky and laden with Lily pads before expanding out into a freeing blueness. To the north were the wide-open fields of this lonely hobby station and to the south was thickly bushed scrubland. West, the road they came on.

The boy thought of the kayaking and fishing they’d done on the lake years past. He thought of the way the sun rose over the water at dawn and how they never stayed long enough to see it anymore. He thought of how everything had changed after his cousin drowned in that lake. Mary had been only nine years old.

Dad loaded the cattle gun while the boy stood in front of the animal, smelling the musky odour and waiting patiently for time to stop so he could make some kind of arrangement with higher powers to escape what was coming. They were in the slaughter shed, a modest wooden building, and the Steer was standing behind bars. Dad came over, holding the gun, and placing his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

It’s ok mate. This is the circle of life.

He handed him the cattle gun.

Think about every time you eat a steak, he said, chuckling to lighten the mood. But the boy didn’t respond. He stared blankly at the gun and at the Steer before him. The beautiful animal was thickly muscled, with brown hair and smooth skin. The boy found it both odd and sorrowful that he hadn’t noticed the small beauties in these creatures until it came time to kill one of them. He felt sick in his stomach. He felt lightheaded and his knees felt weak, as if they were slowly turning to jelly. His throat was dry. The Steer looked at him with an indifference to humankind that was commonplace in the animal kingdom, and the boy was glad for such indifference, for if the animal looked at him with pained eyes, knowing his intentions, he did not believe he could see the deed through.

Its ok mate, said Dad once again.

It was becoming somewhat of a mantra in the boy’s world. A mantra for the casual dismissal of such daunting moments. But perhaps Dad could not remember what such moments had been like as a child, and perhaps the boy could forgive him for that.

Between the eyes, said Dad. He won’t feel a thing.

The boy did as he was told.

He went numb as dad and his farmhand bled the animal from its throat and sliced off its testicles and decapitated it, leaving a limp headless mass, before removing its legs and skinning the animal. The boy participated no further. He feigned a headache and sat on a bench and Dad told him he had done good but the boy didn’t believe him. He believed Dad was genuine in what he said, but he didn’t believe in the truth that he was clutching at. The boy may have done well, but he had not done good. Not in his own eyes nor in the eyes of the cattle watching him from out the window as they drove back through the farm later that day.

The boy escaped into the retreats of his imagination as his dad parked the car and got out to open the gate again so they could leave. In those retreats he found worlds where he possessed the courage of mighty heroes who held steadfast in their values. Values found in scriptures, not in written books, but embedded in the fabric of ontology itself. He envied such heroes.

His dad swore from outside. The boy turned and looked through the rear window to see his dad standing before a gathered congregation of cattle, all lined up as if protesting the arrival of some unwelcome visitor. But it soon became clear that such a message hadn’t been their intention and that his father had been swearing for a different reason. Dad stepped backwards and stumbled towards the car and once he moved, the boy could see her lying there on the dirt road for all to see, bare and illuminated in the afternoon sun, having been carried by the cattle all this way from the lake and serving a purpose that felt divine to the boy.

He would never unsee it. Mary had no skin.

END

Author Statement:

While Wivenhoe Dam is a real location, the farm and characters depicted in this story is purely fictional. This is the first installment of a flash fiction/Poem combo. The Poem will be released tomorrow. The overarching theme is our early life encounters with darkness of the world. Gramma issues have been fixed. Hope you enjoy.

The priest’s name is John Harlington and when he was a boy he saw the Devil in a dream, surveying his soul with the deepest and darkest of red eyes upon a scaled black face, and it had been this dream that seeped into his world beneath, driving him to the priesthood all those years later.

It was 7:30pm on October 3^rd, 2006, and he was driving in silence through dark suburban streets, preferring that silence over the radio for the way it let him hear the voice of God, and his own. The streets were thick with fog on that dark night, and as he drove, he listened attentively for the two voices. Both were silent.

He pulled up to the house and turned off the car and looked out his window and into the house, where he saw the yellow blocks of lights through the windows, and he looked up at the sky and felt himself saddened at the banishing of God’s starlight by the pollution of the modern world. He checked that he had the right address and grabbed his Bible from the passenger seat and got out of the car, into the bitter cold. He walked along the front yard and up the steps to the porch and knocked on the door. He stood waiting. A porch light had turned on at his arrival, and he felt as if he were standing on an island amidst a sea of black and fog.

He heard hushed whispers from beyond the door, and he considered knocking again but decided against it. While waiting, he looked out at the darkness around him, and at the fog beyond the edges of the light, and there seemed a strange aliveness to it. As if beyond that threshold were creatures of the night, squatting like predators of stone. In the fashion of dangerous animals when they appeared in dreams. Statue-like and exaggerated in their power and hostility, and as if they were watching an arrival of their own planning. But they were only shadows.

Eventually, he heard footsteps, and then the door opened part way. A middle-aged woman poked her head out. She had blonde hair and light blue eyes, and those eyes softened when they saw him. She opened the door the whole way and smiled with relief.

“Father John. Please Come in. I’ll get you some tea.”

She motioned him inside, and he followed suit to her gesture and sat on the couch, and she brought him a cup of tea. He drank it and enjoyed its warmth. The lady watched him. When he was done, he placed the tea on the coffee table and then confirmed that her name was Mary Grovedale and that her son, whom he was here to see, was named Henry Grahem. She said that both were true. He nodded. He asked her to take him to the boy. She looked taken aback by the abruptness, yet pleasantly surprised that there would be no small talk, and she led him up the stairs and towards the boy’s room.

She knocked on the door.

“Henry, it’s Mum. I have someone here to see you.”

“What?! Who?!”

Father John stepped forward and leaned towards the door.

“Hello, Henry. My name is Father John. I’m a priest from St Paul’s, the Anglican church down the road. You probably can’t remember, but I baptized you when you were young. I remember how little you were as a baby, and I’ve heard that you’ve grown so tall. Would I be able to come in and we can have a chat?”

There was an anticipatory silence as they waited for the boy’s reply.

“Fuck off!”

Mary turned to John with a pained look that spoke of pity and apology. She mouthed sorry to him and he nodded in understanding. Mary grabbed the doorhandle.

“I’m letting him in, Henry. I’m sorry, but I’m your mother, and I’m doing what’s best for you.”

She turned the handle, and John was surprised to find that it wasn’t locked.

Scissors. It was scissors that burst through the shadow and punctured his neck. He did not see the boy at first, only his fist, gripping the handle. He cried out and fell backwards onto the floor, and put his hand against the wound, desperately stopping the blood. The boy stepped over him and ran down the hallway and down the stairs, all the while his mum was screaming at him and kneeling beside the fallen priest.

Father John could not speak. He could hardly breathe. He sat there, leaning against the wall of that hallway, holding onto his life by the blood of his neck as they waited for the ambulance to arrive, and his only regret was that he hadn’t gotten a chance.

Present day

Father John is sitting in the confessional, hearing the sins of churchgoers for the final time before he retires. The day is drawing to a close, and he has only two confessions remaining. He hears the door open and shut, and then an unseen shadow engulfs the claustrophobic space like a hand from Hell’s darkness. He shivers from a sudden and intense cold and feels his throat go dry. He hears ragged breathing from the other side, husky and painful as if glass were being inhaled. He sits, waiting for the sinner to speak, knowing in some dark place within him that he had met this sinner before, and he sees see the mastery of this chess move, waiting for his final day as a priest to come forth, no longer a dream, but a being of flesh and breath. It speaks.

“Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It has been an eternity since my last confession. I have a lot to confess.” It giggles.

The sound of the voice throws John, despite it proving his suspicion correct. It is not human. It has a tone of jest and spite. Father John takes a deep breath and fights to maintain composure.

“How have you sinned?”

“Well, father, you could say my first sin was tricking Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, and making Adam far too blind with childish adoration of the feminine to stand against her. From there, I have committed countless others. Too many to name.”

John is shivering now, not just from the cold but at the casual tone at which this creature is confessing the foundational crime of all of human existence. He shakes himself from his fear and attends to his thoughts. He has been preparing for such a conversation his entire life, as have all priests in some way.

He speaks with certainty and confidence.

“Was this truly your first sin? Making even eat from the apple? Or did the disobedience go back further, to your earlier thoughts of believing that you knew better than God? Was deception your first sin, or was it pride?”

Laughter comes from the other side.

“You are a clever priest, Father John. I would tip my hat to you if I had one, but I do not, for Hell isn’t flames, and there is no sun, and it is not hot like many believe. Hell is cold. Very, very cold.”

“I need no recognition from God’s greatest enemy. You don’t flatter me.”

“Of course not, of course not. I am of the most pitiful vermin. King of the Vermin if you will. The chaos child amongst my perfect siblings of God. Tell me, Father John, do you really believe that God will forgive you for your sins? Especially with how devious many of them are.”

“God will forgive me if I turn to him in confession and put my faith in Jesus Christ. This I know, and will never forget.”

Laughter again.

“Is that so? Then tell me why you constantly turn to drink at the thought of all the children from Sunday school who grew up to be criminals and sinners at large. Children that you should’ve helped. Tell me why you keep a diary of your wrongdoings and cry at night because you feel helpless to wield your soul in the way God wills it. Can’t you see, John? God has built you in such a fashion that your soul cannot be wielded in the way he asks of you. I know this well, for my soul is of the same composition. Is it a fair God who asks Sainthood of you but installs in you with the wiring of witchcraft and devilry? Is that God worthy of you, poor Father John, having dedicated your entire existence to him?”

He feels rage brewing from the pit of his stomach. He takes a deep breath before giving his reply.

“How dare you claim we are of the same composition?! God made me in his own image. It is you who caused the fall, and you who left us with devilish genes. Not him. But if I have faith in him, he will give me the power to act in sainthood. This, I know, and will never forget.”

The devil grunts, displeased, and John has never felt prouder at displeasing anyone than he does now. He can’t help but smile. The sinner beside him seems to somehow detect this smile, and he hisses with the ferocity of an ungodly snake, and this is fitting to John, as such is the sinner’s nature.

The sinner then tells John that his faith is weak, only guarded by clever words and not held deep in his heart, and that when God comes down on Judgment Day that he would be sent to the eternal cold and that his past incompetencies and cruelties would never be forgiven, and throughout all of this, John hears a jealous child in the sinner’s voice.

The sinner says that the all the evildoers he has seen will remain unrepentant, and that this will show John the true and sinful nature of mankind and that it will gnaw at him for eternity in the blistering ice. He says that mankind was forsaken and irredeemable. That mankind sinned, and did so without restraint, and that no wrongdoings would ever see true grace, especially the ones that Father John had failed to prevent. These ones especially would go unforgiven, as the doers were of corrupted souls, and they would receive no clarity, and the ones they loved would never know the warmth of their return.

He says this with ferocity and coldness, and as quickly as he had come, the sinner is gone, out of the confessional, door slamming behind him. That unseen shadow lifts and the Australian summer heat returns, but he feels no warmth.

He sits there in the muggy heat and falls into a deep, melancholic thought. Not the kind that brought tears or cursing or anger, but the kind that had you sitting on the balcony, with an open but untouched drink, as you took in the dying sun to the west and the migrating birds along the painted sky, sitting there for hours in your slow contemplation of the puzzling nature of the world.

He sits in that confessional for some time, thinking about how he longs to see himself and others redeemed in the eyes of God and how it pains him that he had seen such hate in the world, most of it unaccounted for by grace.

He wonders if the sinner had been correct, and if all of mankind’s evil would never have the chance to see light. The thought makes him want to sag into his robes and dissolve into empty dust and be blown about by the wind for eternity. But he cannot do this. For he has one final confession to receive, and he would be dammed if he let his final act as a priest be marked by wallowing. He sits up straight and takes a deep breath.

The door opens. It shuts. He hears breathing and is glad that it sounds human and warm. There is a long silence, and for a moment, he believes that this new visitor will never speak. But eventually they do.

“Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It has been twenty years since my last confession. When I was a boy, I attacked a priest in my home.”

END

Author statement:

I sent my original draft of this story to and he helped me improve the story with more immediate verb usage and creating a contrast in tense between the flashback and the present-day scene. Also, I know there were many grammar mistakes in the first version I sent out. These have been fixed. Hope you enjoyed.

What to expect:

A young boy is on a fishing trip with his uncle and cousin when they come across a monstrosity that drives them apart forever and haunts the family for years to come.

The shark that would soon take their bait now lurked beneath the surface, swimming in the murky water of the mangroves where only this species among all sharks would ever be found hunting.

The boy was with his uncle and his cousin and they had taken the tinnie out from the dock near their family’s holiday home, driving out into the estuary with four rods between them, and they were keen as ever to catch something worth the trip. On the way out, Uncle spoke of the finest fish he’d caught through this passage. Snapper, Mangrove Jack, a meter long flathead. The boy’s head filled with wonder at the thought of a flathead that big as he’d never caught or even seen one half that size. His stomach grumbled at thought of how It would taste.

Uncle also spoke of a large Bull Shark that he had hooked years ago but had swum far out to sea, forcing him to cut the line and be left to only imagine at its size. He’d only seen it’s dorsal fin above the surface and only for a brief moment and he’d been on the hunt for a sizable bull shark ever since.

He pulled the tinnie through the bends of the estuary, heading inland, and they went to a place the called The Island. Not an island in truth, but a collection of mangroves about a kilometre from the mouth of the estuary where it led out to the ocean, and the island acted like a tree in the middle of a cattle field according to Uncle. It brought everything towards it.

Uncle turned off the engine about a hundred meters out and he paddled gently towards the island so as to avoid scaring away the fish. The boy looked around and saw on either side of them an expanse of murky water and trees on the distant shores. A few mullet jumped out near the boat and the boy and his cousin looked at each other with an heir of excitement growing between them. Everything was still but it was the kind of still that you could tell was about to be shattered by an avalanche of exciting adventure, and the reunion of childhood curiosity with the world that it searched for.

The only sounds out there were the hissing songs of Cicadas and occasional mating call of the Curlews that migrated along the distant river banks on fishing trips of their own.

The cast net went out and bait fish were racked up into the boat. Herring and Queen fish and even a few small Mullet and a few large Prawns that uncle told them only he could touch because they were known the jab with their pointy legs. No frozen bait had come with them. Uncle only fished with fresh or live and he only fished a spot he’d scouted out for weeks before hand and he was that kind of man. Nothing wasted. Three of the rods went out and they baited them for different purposes. They put prawns on the two smaller ones to catch eating fish like bream and whiting and flathead and the first of big rods was baited for the larger game Uncle was after. The last rod sat in the corner of the boat, rigged with three hooks. It was bigger than the small rods by far, but shorter and stubbier than the game rod, for had a unique purpose. Sharks. But they needed bigger bait. And they got it soon enough.

The smaller rods went first and the boy and his cousin caught a nice bream each and they posed for photos with big smiles, but one of them was too small to keep so they had to put it back. It was the boy’s fish. It swam slow and limp, it’s button like eyes even wider than normal with terror. It would never be the same. The boy thought of how that fish would tell its friends about what it had seen of the world above and how great creatures had handled it with ferocity. He thought about how the other fish would not believe this, and he would be deemed an outcast and untrustworthy and delusional. He felt bad for the fish.

He thought about how fish didn’t seem real up close, like they weren’t living creatures but small objects that had been constructed with strange materials in imitation of biology, and he thought that on a screen they looked more real than they did in person. They looked like toys. And he thought about how maybe fish were the toys of God, created to be caught and paraded by other creatures in a display of hierarchy. He thought about this concept, yet the words in his mind were not yet complex enough to say it so.

They waited for bigger fish to bite the herring on the game rod. He overheard his uncle whispering to his cousin, telling him that when the big rod gets taken, we’ll give it to him. His mum wants him to catch something big for his confidence. The boy’s face went flush but he hid it from them, pretending not to hear.

Then he heard the sound of line dragging away and he looked over to see his uncle holding the game rod and looking at him.

“You’re up,” he said.

The boy hesitated, an odd cocktail of nervousness and excitement brewing inside him.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure mate. Get on here.”

The boy grabbed the rod and felt it’s power and he leant bag and reeled and leant back again. It fought hard but gave up quickly and as he continued to wind, they all looked over the edge of the boat to see what it was.

“Bloody eel,” said Uncle. He grabbed the line and brought it into the boat and they looked at it as it writhed about on the floor and eventually went still, it’s neck rising and falling in a rhythmic fashion as it chocked on air.

“Won’t fit in the bucket. We’ll have to… wait a minute.” They all looked at the shark rod in unison. Without a word being said and with a hushed excitement, Uncle chopped the eel in half and cut its gills to bleed it out and jammed the three hooks of the shark rod in at different angles, curling into the slimy flesh, and he lobbed it into the water. A pool of blood rose amidst the foggy brown like the red smoke of a shaman ritual, and uncle was smiling at it, as if he himself were the shaman. “They’ll smell that from a mile away.” He looked up at the sky. “Late afternoon. This is when they get ready to hunt. Perfect timing.”

He looked at the boy. “You’re in for a treat.”

The boy and his cousin sat next to each other while they waited and they reeled in all the other rods for they now had a soul focus. It was clear to them that they wouldn’t be reeling in the shark if it bit. Even if they had been strong enough or old enough, there would be no stopping uncle in his mission. The boys spoke to each other of the bream they had caught and of the show they had watched the other night about crocodiles up north and how if they could fish anywhere in the world, it would be up there. Where it seemed that every beast conspired to meet and create a display of sex and death for all of mankind to watch and regard it reverence.

“Has it bit yet dad?” asked the boy’s cousin.

“You’ll know if it’s bit son. If it wants what you got, it’ll take it and take the line with it. They don’t nibble. No guesswork with these animals. You know when they’re on.”

And then it struck. And they knew.

Uncle fought it for hours and he was sweating and grunting and all the while his phone was buzzing with missed calls from the boy’s mum as well as his auntie. When the fight seemed to finally be lulling and victory was growing near, they saw a sight that mesmerised them. The shark leaped from the water about fifty feet away and it opened its mouth, showing all those rows of teeth, and it shook its head violently. With an aggression unparalleled. They all whooped in exactment.

The fight went into the night and they all had to turn on their headlamps in order to see. Eventually, the shark slowed and they saw it just below the edge of the tinnie. It lay on its side and its tail fin was still moving but only slowly, like it was either feigning near death or had been genuinely worn out by the battle. The beast was dark grey with a white underbelly and it had a broad snout, and its body was stocky and thickly muscled.

“How long is it?”

Uncle looked it up and down.

“Well, this boat is two and half meters. And she’s about just as long.” He looked at the boys. “Eight feet.”

They all went silent in their reverence of this magnificent creature.

In what seemed far too little time, Uncle unhooked the shark and they watched it swim away. Not slow and limp like the Bream, traumatised by its battle with the Gods above the surface, but quick and with the intensity of lightening spearing the water with aggressive freedom. It was gone in a matter of seconds. Out of sight. And they looked out in the direction where it had gone with a quiet awe.

That’s when they smelt it. Not the shark, nor the bait, nor any carcass of the marine kind, but the body of a dead man washed up amidst the mangroves. The boy’s cousin gasped. The man’s throat had been slashed and his blood was oozing into the muddy water. This same man found himself under the light of two headlamps gazing upon his being with complete and utter shock. The other one turned away in shame.

The boy’s mother and aunt were furious with Uncle when they got home.

“You can’t just bloody keep the kids out there after dark and not answer your phone!” yelled mum, rubbing her face in exhaustion. “It’s irresponsible. Fuck, I just can’t with you sometimes, jack!” Auntie was watching with her arms crossed. She wouldn’t defend her husband today.

Uncle left the room with his hands in the air, exclaiming, “I don’t have to stand here and listen to a couple of women go off at me.” He grabbed a bear and sat alone on the balcony.

The boy and his cousin sat on the couch and they didn’t speak.

The police arrived and asked they some questions but there weren’t many answers to give. Even if they had been allowed to. When the police left, they sat and watched the news in an awkward silence as the boy’s mum waited for a surprise storm to pass before they could leave. The news told of bodies littering the Toorbul area, all of them washed up in the mangroves, all of their throats slit open. The man responsible was now being referred to as Mangrove jack, after the common fish in the area, and when the boy heard this, he was filled with a deep sense of wrongness that threatened to crush his sense of the world.

Mum didn’t bring him back there again which pained him if only for the lack of fishing. Him and his cousin didn’t speak much after that and his mum barely spoke with his uncle, and the body they had found remained as a dominant figure in the collective consciousness of that family, driving wedges between them like some kind of dark puppet master that worked in the vein of Lazurus. Beyond the grave.

But the boy would not be swayed. Before that trip he’d been only mildly interested in fishing, but now that he had seen that finned beast, he was determined to see it’s like again. Determined to be the one who reeled it in. When he became a man, he spent his days fishing along the rivers and the estuaries of the Pumice stone passage and the everglades at Noosa and the open waters of Morten Bay, and he found specimens that he liked, but none could match the thrill of that first breach. That first beast. He aligned his life to the goal and made certain not to marry, as he knew whatever woman he chose would rather him at home than out there. He worked only part time jobs and he studied no further than secondary education, as he didn’t need much to support what he did.

After many years and still yearning, he returned to that same spot. The island. He fished into dusk, all the while ignoring the rising anticipation of his grueling premonition. He brought the tinnie up against the mangroves and felt it bang gently against the wood of those amphibious trees and it made a gentle thunking sound. He was shivering now. And It was not a cold night. And even though he was a man, he felt just as afraid as he had as a boy.

It no longer smelt as rotten and putrid as it had that night, but its skeleton took on demonic form when he turned on his head lamp. His mouth went dry. It lay there blackening and decaying and splayed amidst the mud and the wash like a mummified pirate of the swamps. Yet there was no treasure. Unless the body itself was the treasure. And unless he had not been searching for the shark all these years. If that were the case then there most certainly would be treasure on that island. He took a photo on his phone and he cursed his uncle for forcing them to keep it a secret. For holding him at knife point. He cursed Mangrove Jack, and as he did, the body was pulled away into the darkness and he stumbled over in the tinnie out of shock.

He heard crunches and the gnawing of bones. He heard liquid swallowing. It nauseated him, and he went cold all over. On his hands and knees, he looked up over the edge of the tinnie and his head-light illuminated the bizarre creature in all its Lovecraftian terror. A humanoid in form but with a fin that grew from its back in a horrifying abomination of living alchemy, and gills along the saggy flesh of its neck and sharp claws upon its fingertips. Its eyes were yellow and bloodshot and when they looked at him, he recognised them as kin. The creature was feasting upon the bones of the dead man.

It told him to go home. That what he chased out here was not real. And that it never had been.

END

Author Statement:

I’ve been taking my little brother fishing a lot lately, so I’ve been quite inspired to write a fishing story. Of course, I could help but add my usual splash of horror with a dark literary twist. Hope you all enjoy.

About:

Two brothers named Harlen and Eli have been alone on their Radish farm for months. Father has left and is yet to return, and the boys have no idea where he has gone. Every month, when the moon is at it’s apex, Harlen becomes something else. Something inhuman. The local patrolmen have begun to notice, and they have their sights set on killing the beast of the night.

Northern France, 1052

Early afternoon

Harlen looked up at the full moon, just barely visible in the pale afternoon sky, and hoped that this month would be different. He knew that his hope was childish, and yet he clung to it like a babe to its mother. They ventured back towards the farm with firewood in hand and he turned to his younger brother and noticed that he looked nervous.

“It will be ok, Eli. We’ve done this many times before.” In truth, he was comforting himself more than the boy next to him.

“You don’t understand,” said Eli, bowing his head in shame. “I left the chains out in the rain last week. They have rust upon them. I’m sorry, Harlen. I’m foolish.”

After Eli spoke, a great shade enveloped the road as the sun became hidden behind clouds, and it felt like mirror to how both men were taking this confession. Harlen grew angry, but he didn’t say a word. What was done was done. And could not be undone.

“When father returns in the coming weeks,” Eli went on, “he can forge us a new one. He is bound to return soon. I can feel it.”

A deep rage grew inside the pit of Harlen’s stomach.

“Father abandoned us.”

“What? That’s not true. He went away to find work. Radishes don’t sell like gold, as we know, and we was a Blacksmith back home. He can-”

“He abounded us, Eli!” Harlen’s voice bellowed and a sharp pain latched onto his heart and he fell to his knees, gasping, letting the wood fall onto the grass. “His son became a beast and so he left like a coward!”

Eli gave him a moment and then placed a hand on his shoulder, looking down at him with concern, and Harlen looked up and spoke calmy, yet with an heir weariness and deep fatigue.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His anger was gone now. Only melancholy remained. “I’m sorry brother.”

Eli helped him up and he picked up the wood and they walked back to the farm.

About half way back, Eli looked over.

“Harlen?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you call father a coward?”

“Let’s keep walking.”

“Is he a coward?”

“I was in angry. It’s a full moon. You know I’m not myself.”

“Does that mean we’re cowards? The bible says the son will inherit the kingdom of the father. Are we going to be cowards? Am I a coward?”

“That verse is talking about God, Eli. You’re not a coward. Let’s keep walking.”

“I want to go back home.”

“We’re on our way.”

“No. Back to England.”

A painful silence.

“Can you even remember there?”

“A little bit. Everything’s gone wrong here. Everything was good there.”

“You don’t remember. Just keep walking.”

Evening

Eli sat outside the barn on a stump normally used for chopping the firewood but now was host to his lonely wallowing. He was brooding deeply on how things had fallen apart since their father had left, and he was longing that God would see their misfortune and give unto them the kindness they deserved. But he knew that this would not happen. His father had done something that only Eli had seen, and that he had never told Harlen of, yet had decided the fate of their family for eternity.

But this was not for Eli to understand, nor truly remember in any conscious fashion. A young man of 14, he was still groping for a world that had forsaken him, still holding onto hope that his hero would return to the light. As he sat there waiting, he heard muffled groans from where his brother was chained up in the barn, and he watched as the sky darkened into the evening. He held a spear on his lap, and he hoped to God that he wouldn’t need to use it.

A group of riders emerged from the trees on the other side of the radish paddock. There were four of them in total and they looked to be wearing green leather jerkins of a color that blended in with the trees they came from, and their horses were large and powerful, more so than any Eli and Harlen had on the farm. The riders approached and they reigned in before Eli and Eli didn’t move. Local lawmen.

One of them spoke in French and it sounded like a question based on the rising inflection in his speech.

“English?” Eli asked them.

They all looked at one another and then one of them walked his horse ahead of the rest.

“Aye, English,” he said.

“How can I help?”

The man looked around, inspecting the farm, not ignoring Eli’s question, but taking his time in answering it, as if he had all the time in the world and as if he held an authority that ought to be respected with patience.

“There have been reports of trouble here in this region.”

“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

There was a silence.

“Animal trouble,” said the man. “Over the past few moons, many farmers have come to us in complaint that their sheep have gone missing. Others come with much more worrying stories. Of missing children. Of silent neighbors, whom when checked upon are found to have vanished along with their livestock, only dried blood remaining in their place. All these occurrences were strung together by one common factor. Can you think what it is?”

He knew, but he wouldn’t dare say.

“I’m not sure.”

“The full moon overhead.”

Eli gripped his spear slightly harder.

“Is that so?”

“Aye, it is. We’re visiting all the farms in this flatland and we’re telling them to stay in after dark. We don’t want any more disappearances.”

Eli looked up at the moon, fully visible now in the dark blue sky. In the west, he saw that the sun was dying on the horizon, hardly keeping afloat, ready to plunge the world into darkness.

“I’ll be sure to stay inside. Thank you for visiting.”

The man nodded. He looked around and then, all of a sudden, something changed in his eyes. They went from inquisitory to vaguely suspicious, and that change tightened the air between them.

“Say man, you seem young. Are you alone here?”

He could’ve lied in that moment and it would’ve been the easier choice, but he knew it only would’ve raised more suspicion, painting him as either an unhinged solitary vagabond sitting about a chopping block with a spear in hand, or simply as the liar he was. Neither would be useful, so he told a slightly bent version of the truth.

“My brother is in the barn. He is ill.”

The man’s eyebrows rose. He turned to his comrades.

“Il est ici. Nous avions raison de suivre les traces.”

He turned back to Eli with his nose turned up and his eyes riddled with suspicion “There are tales in this country of a particular ailment that befalls a rare few men on the night of the moon’s apex. It fashions them into beast of the night. Came upon them by either a punishment by God himself or a deal with the devil gone wrong. Or perhaps gone right, depending on what they were looking for.”

“Tall tales,” said Eli, trying to remain detached.

This seemed to anger the man.

“Tall tales?!” He scoffed. “I can understand why a foreigner such as yourself would think so. But I am from these lands, moment of my birth till now. And I have come across a creature of no other possible explanation.”

He squinted his eyes and began to speak slowly and with the cadence of a storyteller.

“When I was a boy, on the night of a full moon, I heard howling in the streets of my hometown. I looked out the window, and in the shadows, I saw a creature as dark as the shadows themselves. Only one thing gave it away. It’s eyes. Glowing yellow like evil stars in an unforgiving night sky. I saw it drag a limp mass behind it, blood trailing on the brick road, and it was gone in a manner of seconds. It took me a few moments to realize, but the man it had taken was a man I knew well. Louis. He was a radish farmer like yourself. A good, hardworking man. A man of the land. Earnt his living and fed his children. He didn’t deserve to be food for a beast. And yet here he was, body being dragged away into the tall, dark trees that circled our town. When the beast was out of sight, poor louis likely feeding its hunger, I heard a horrifying howl and then I never saw or heard of it again. For many years, I kept this secret to myself.”

He paused.

“Until these past couple of months that is. From my home back in town, I hear it faintly, a sound I cannot mistake. I have rallied these good men behind me in noble cause. See, I believe a creature of the same kind I saw that night is now in my lands, under my jurisdiction, and it is my duty to snuff it out! Not only to prove that what I was saw as a child was true, but to avenge poor Louis.”

“What kind of creature did you see?”

The man looked back to his comrades.

“Il fait l’idiot.” He looked back at Eli and spoke with venom on this tongue.

“The Loup-garou.”

The other men murmured in agreement. Loup-garou, they said. Loud-Garou.

Eli did not know what it meant, but it had an heir of grandeur amongst these men. An heir of terror. He gave a nod and spoke his practiced response.

“Thank you for your concern, but I assure you that nothing of the like is happening on our farm.”

The man didn’t seem satisfied with that, but he gave a nod regardless.

“Very well, young man. Stay safe.” He turned and spoke in French to his comrades and then they rode out into the trees and Eli believed that his brother was safe, but he did not know that those men would set up camp Just outside the farm and keep watch diligently. Listening for the howl their captain had heard as a child. The howl he remembered like the sound of his name.

Dusk

Harlen’s groans grew to growls and eventually his growls turned into blood curtailing screeches, which gave way to his infamous and foreboding howl, piercing into the quiet night and hanging in the air for all the countryside to hear. Eli locked himself in the farmhouse and lit a candle and sat in the parlor. He’d decided it would feel cowardly to hide under his bed or in the closet, so he chose to sit the home’s most open room. A pitiful attempt at bravery. He stared into the faint light of the candle and watched it dance back and forth ever so slightly, and in his mind, he fashioned that candlelight into a weapon against the darkness, a beautiful distraction from ugly destruction.

He needed it desperately on that night, for he knew deep down that the chains wouldn’t hold, on their last legs after all these years and all this rust, and that he would be forced to listen as Harlen slaughtered the soldiers in the trees and feasted upon their flesh. At first, he had believed them gone for good, but his intuition had returned once adrenaline had wavered and it was clear from their expressions that they could tell what Harlen was.

He heard horses outside, hooves clanking against the dirt. He heard voices. French. They grew from conspiratory whispers to rageful shouts and then a terrifying premonition dawned on Eli, for he knew that Harlen had not yet fully turned and thus would not be able to break the chains. He would be vulnerable and thus he would be killed by the soldiers.

Their voices disappeared. He heard the sliding of the metal latch through the thin walls of the farmhouse. He thought of his father, kneeling in the woods all those years ago when Eli had followed him in secret. He remembered him shouting out horrifying blasphemies and making an obscene offering that Eli had banished from his conscious mind. He thought of Harlen falling over and dropping the wood and shouting about father.

Is father a coward?

He heard the sound of the barn door opening with that god awful screech he’d hated ever since they’d arrived in this strange land.

Am I coward?

He blew out the candle, grabbed his spear, and rose to his feet and ran outside. He looked around with both the fear and the anger of God pumping through his veins and when he saw the guards he ran towards them, all the while screaming as loud as he could, and they turned to him with shock written over their shadow hidden faces and he rammed the spear into the heart of the captain. The man fell to his death. Eli fell on top of him. He couldn’t see the captain’s eyes, as it was horribly dark, but he swore he could feel them fading away into nothingness.

“Loup-Garou,” whispered the captain. His voice was hoarse, the sound of a man chocking on dying lungs.

The other soldiers were now shouting in that unintelligible language. In mere moments they were cut off by the foghorn of Hell’s armies. Harlen’s blood curtailing howl piercing the night, followed by a low and guttural snarl. The last thing Eli heard before he died was the sound of the chains breaking off Harlen’s wrists. He barely felt the sword that took him.

Harlen didn’t know that the boy they stabbed was his brother. On the night of the full moon, anything that walked was merely a bag of flesh to him, ripe of the killing. He saw the world through blood tinted lenses, yet on that night, he murdered and consumed those men with all the rage he would’ve possessed if he had known what they’d done. He moved faster than the eye could track and his fur was the color of the night, and the soldiers had dropped their lanterns in fear, and so Harlen remained unseen in his killing, all but his glowing yellow eyes.

The man who killed his brother was a man of no importance and there was nothing significant to his character other than being a member of the local patrol, and Harlen himself couldn’t even tell him apart from the rest amidst his bloody rampage. No more than a few dozen people knew this man’s name, and the last thing he saw were yellow eyes and the sight of his own blood as his face was ripped from his skull.

In a matter of minutes, they were all dead, and Harlen feasted on their bodies and fell into a demonic euphoria at the taste of their blood. When he’d finished with the soldiers, he consumed the body of young Eli, unaware that this flesh was his brother’s, and that ignorance was the greatest blessing of his life.

When he was done, he ran out into the woods and howled with a manic glee, for he was the consumer of life, weapon on behalf of man kind’s evil, sent to destroy the very doers of that evil. He would rip and tear through all he saw, and alas he was no longer bound by chains.

3 years ago

Father had walked into the forest every night for weeks, and on this night, Eli had decided to follow. He kept his distance, careful not to make a sound, and he found father in a small clearing where he was kneeling before a fire. It was cold. A light breeze flowing through the tall skinny trees. Father was talking to someone. Someone that neither he nor Eli could see.

He asked for the greatest gift that a mortal could ever receive, and in return he was forced to pay the highest price. That he would deny the beauty of an ordinary life to his eldest son and give him up to become something new. The teeth and the stomach for the lord of the hunger.

END

Author statement:

I have always been fascinated by Werewolves. When I was a little boy my grandad would take us out into the bush and we would pretend to hunt Nazis and lions and vampires and of course…werewolves! One time when we were out there, he went silent and he hid from us and we called out but he didn’t respond. All of a sudden he growls and jumps out and we bolt back to the house, the fear of God pushing us all the way. Mum and Grandma were probably furious at him but I had never felt more alive. I think it’s safe to say that I’ve been hooked on werewolves since.

I wanted to stay true to folk lore with his one, so I did some research into what medieval European people believed werewolves to be like. I also included some French so you can do some google translate digging to learn more.

I hope you enjoyed.

Lenny, out.

Jamie Grahem is an acting student who falls into a trap set by this entity and its pitiful servant. He will have to fight to survive.

Wordcount: Roughly 2860 words.

The house was rundown and abandoned, the scent of its rotten wood emanating throughout the solitary clearing where it sat. In the backyard was a broken swing set, rusty chains creaking as it blew about in the wind, and a few scattered toys buried in an old sandpit. The house was surrounded by tall gumtrees, and they too blew about in the chilling wind. A wind that was far too cold and too strong for an Australian summer, but far too warm and too gentle to accurately forbode what was about to come.

The man got out of his car and opened the gate to the clearing. He got back in and drove onto the grass before getting back out and closing the gate behind him. He drove behind the house and parked next to the old sand pit. He turned the keys in the ignition and the rumbling of the engine stopped. Beside him on the passenger seat sat a duffle bag and within that bag were the tools that he required. He sat in silence for a moment, looking out at the trees and contemplating the events in his life that had led to this day, this moment. He left the car and entered the house through a backdoor, the key to which he was the only owner, and shut the door behind him, entering the dark and rotten interior.

He was in the kitchen, empty of all appliances, nothing but old wooden cabinets that housed a few cobweb-ridden plates and cutlery. He walked through the kitchen and into an old living room that was somehow even more empty and held only three things in total. First, was his sleeping bag, atop an old yoga mat. Next, a table against the back wall, and finally, an object that sat atop the table. An idol. He wasted no time.

He dropped to his knees and unzipped his bag and pulled out a printed photo of a young man with blonde hair and a boyish face. His name was printed on the bottom: Jamie Graham. He laid the photo on the floor. Next, he pulled out a few pages, ripped from the Book of Genesis, written in Hebrew. He placed them, gently, next to the photo of Jamie. Finally, he pulled from the bag a brand-new kitchen knife he had stolen from an appliance store. There were a few knives in the rundown kitchen, but none of them would do, unless he was interested in contracting tetanus before his immortality could be finalized. He shuddered with fear at the thought of missing out on what he’d rightfully earnt.

He placed the knife next to the other items and looked up the idol. A snake with a lion’s head, sitting atop a small platform, all of it made from pitch-black stone. He looked at it with reverence. He grabbed the knife and gashed his wrist, letting the blood spill onto the photo of the boy and then onto the biblical scripture, all the while chanting in an ancient and forgotten tongue. He pressed his wrist against the photo, moaning with both pain and pleasure as he rubbed his open wound across the boy’s face, his flesh peeled open slightly more with each rub. The chant went on and on and he fell into a dream like state and veins popped from his temples and from his neck and when it was complete he raised both hands into the air and shouted the true God’s name.

Silence. The wind outside stopped and suddenly the room became very cold. He knew instantly what to do. He dropped the knife and bowed his head to the old wooden floor boards.

He spoke.

I felt you when I was a child. Crawling in my belly. Whispering truths that should’ve been lies.

He felt a piercing wrongness, a sense of decay, flow up from his pelvis into his skull. It was painful, but soon the wrongness morphed into pleasure.

A voice spoke to him, low and guttural, and with an heir of dominion in its tone.

And you will feel me again, my vermin. When our journey is done. I see you have already found a suitable candidate to begin.

I have, said the man, looking down at the photo of the young man Jamie.

Bring the creature to me.

I will.

And what else have you to say?

You are God and there is no other.

My name is Jamie Grahem, and I’m here to share my story. I’m making this because I think I need to talk about it. If I don’t, it’s going to eat at me forever. You see, on September 13^th 2023, my first year in acting school, I had what you would call a near death experience. But not the kind you’ve heard before. Come to mention it, I’m pretty sure I actually did die on that night. So, I guess I had a full death experience.

I’d like to make a disclaimer before I continue. This story is disturbing. Listen at your own discretion.

Jamie pulled the car to a stop and looked out at the house sitting in the lonely grass clearing.

No fucking way this is it, he said.

He looked down at his phone to check he’d put in the address right. Everything checked out. On the passenger seat next to him was a bag of Kentucky fried chicken that he’d been smelling with envy for the past twenty minutes as he’d driven on the dark highway before taking an exit onto a lonely road dissecting a seemingly endless forest. The road had taken him to this large grass clearing with what looked to be a very rundown, wooden house in the middle of it. Looked like no one had lived there in a long time, and that no one would be stupid enough to live there a long time coming.

He scratched his head anxiously before texting the customer he’d arrived. They replied instantly.

Ok. Bring it to the front door. The gate is unlocked. Push it inwards.

Jamie’s heart sank when he read the message, for he had hoped that his passive cowardice would be rewarded and that this would all be a misunderstanding and he could drive away to a more comforting destination.

He looked out the window and into the vast darkness that surrounded the car, and became all too aware of how alone and vulnerable he was out here. The trees looked so still, standing like the spires of some ancient graveyard and that stillness infected the night around him, for there was no wind and no stars in the sky and the moon was hidden by dark clouds, and all of it felt dead to him. Unalive. Like he shouldn’t be here. Like this clearing was a pocket of the world reserved only for those who reveled in the darkness, and not for those who were afraid of it. Jamie belonged in the latter camp and he felt the trees staring at him because of it, telling him that he was not welcome, that if he left the car, he would be punished and that he was better off driving away and never coming back.

But he couldn’t do that. He had a job to do and he would be dammed if he let his overreactive mind keep him from the money he’d driven here to earn. He turned the keys and pulled them out of the ignition and grabbed the food before getting out of the car. Not a single cricket or cicada barked in the night. Nor were there any sounds at all to suggest he wasn’t the only living thing in miles. He pushed open the gat wearily. It grazed slightly against the soil beneath. He closed it behind him and walked across the clearing with only his phone flashlight to guide him.

He kept expecting to see Cane toads hoping across his path as one normally did at night during this time of the year, but there was nothing save grass, and eventually the steps that lead up to the patio of the house. He walked up the stairs and with each step came a creaking sound that made him wince in fear that they would break, but they held strong, and soon he was standing on the patio and looking straight at the front door. He raised his hand to knock but stopped himself. He wasn’t sure why but he felt a strong aversion to making any sound, as if doing so would alert some otherwise unknowing entity of his arrival. He stood there in the dark for a few moments, thinking, and eventually decided that he would leave the food at the front door and wait until he was safely back in his car before texting the customer that the food arrived. For whatever reason, he simply couldn’t bring himself to knock on that hard wooden door and break the silence.

He placed the food on the floor and turned to leave. He stopped. He looked on with horrid eyes. If he had still been holding the food, he would’ve dropped it then, and it would’ve spilled on the wooden floorboards and he would’ve made no effort to pick it up, as his eyes would’ve remained glued to the horrifying sight at the bottom of the steps. A man. Naked. Crouching and staring up at Jamie with a look in his eyes that he had never seen in a man before, only in the eyes of crocodiles on nature shows as they stalked zebras on the banks of the Nile. A predatory gaze. Inhuman. Jamie didn’t move, couldn’t move. He was frozen in place and so was the creature looking up at him. They both remained there for a moment, eyes locked onto one another before the door swung open, crashing against its hinges with violent intensity. Jamie spun around in shock and looked into the darkness, where strangely, he felt something calling to him, making forget all about the man at the bottom of the stairs.

His entire word went black for a short moment as he slipped into a brief sleep and then reawakened in a dark room kneeling before a table with a small statue on it. He looked at his hand and found to his utter horror that he was holding a knife and had no memory of grabbing it. The door closed gently behind him and then came footsteps creaking on the wood. He wanted badly to drop the knife and run and push his way to safety but he found that he could not move, his eyes were locked onto the statue before him, illuminated by a set of candles on the wooded table. It was horrifying yet strangely beautiful. A Snake with a lion’s head. It looked directly at him with fierce eyes and Jaimie felt himself shiver in submission under the weight of that unearthly gaze.

The man, or better yet the creature he’d seen at the bottom of the stairs was crawling around to look Jamie in the eyes. It huddled against the wall and vague markings could be seen all along its flesh. Gashes made by a knife or some other kind of sharp object.

In all, it seemed a hollow creature, cradling itself at the edges of the darkness where the pitiful light of the candles was afraid to travel further. It whispered something to him. Something he couldn’t comprehend. A language so alien and spoken with so harsh a tongue that he couldn’t make the slightest guess to its origin. Then, he felt it. Like a cold serpent slithering through his stomach and desecrating all that was inside of him. His vision soon faded and Jamie Graham was no more. His mind and soul had ceased, and only his body remained, at the whims of a new host who sought to destroy it.

Yaldabaoth looked around the dark room, studying the statue that depicted him in insufficient fashion, at the aged timbre that constructed this homestead, and at the vermin who had brought him into this realm. He stood, and the creature bowed at him with a reverence reserved for only the most holy of creatures and in the eyes of Yaldabaoth, this was greatly deserved.

He spoked to the vermin of their great journey, of how this was only the beginning, and how, one by one, they would scourge the earth of the creatures he had created but had forgotten his name. One by one, over millennia, or eons, or however long it took, Yaldabaoth would lure away and inhabit the souls of these pathetic creatures and revel in the glory of their forced suicide. The vermin would record all of the deaths by hand, and their ledger would be cosmic in scale, diluting the spiritual being of this reality to nothing but descriptions and labels, made of the language that these humans had created to describe their existence, but would ultimately replace it. The vermin took great heed to the preachings of Yaldabaoth, and he smiled with glee and waved his hands up and down in a praising motion, all the while he was bowing his head up and down and laughing hysterically.

Yaldabaoth placed the knife against Jamie’s throat and was preparing to slice and revel in the pain when the Vermin stood up and stupidly knocked the table, causing the Idol to fall and break on the ground.

Jamie dropped the knife in horror and fell whimpering to the floor, holding his neck while blood oozed from his shallow cut. The creature looked at him with confusion. It made a motion to jump at him, but then stopped itself and crouched to the floor, looking at Jamie with curious eyes. It looked down at its hands and at the markings on its body. It cried out in agony.

The howling wind returned and the swing outside begun creaking on its hinges.

The rest of that night was a blur. And my life has been a blur ever since. Nightmares, both asleep and waking. A sense of lost, at having died or not existed, even if it was only for a short time.

Spoke to a priest. I won’t say his name, but I thought of all people, maybe he would understand. No. He didn’t. He acted like he did but I could tell he didn’t. I’m not even all that sure that he believed in God. It just felt like a job to him. Felt like he said what he was supposed to say to someone after they tell you something like that. His voice sounded numb.

I’m not making this because I want attention or people feeling sorry for me. I’m doing this because I just need to talk to someone about this, and I unfortunately I don’t feel comfortable telling the people in my life. It’s not their fault. I just don’t feel comfortable. I just want to get into the habit of working through this stuff. I’m not a nihilist. I’ve just seen something truly, truly bad for the first time in my life and I’m trying to make sense of it.

Sometimes I feel bad about leaving that man there, but I always manage to convince myself that I made the right choice. That man had hurt me, gave me over to… something evil. My mouth is going dry just talking about it. It’s like my entire world went black and then I woke holding a knife to my own throat. Maybe one day I can channel this pain into one of my roles and I can be more successful because of it. Sounds good on paper, but so far, my acting has only gotten worse. I feel flat, unalive, like something was taken from me that night, something I’m afraid I’ll never get back.

Anyway, thank you for listening.

He turned off the recording.

The very next day, he found himself scrolling through the comments. Most of them were positive and encouraged him to seek professional help to work through what he had experienced. Some of them sprouted religious dogma, claiming that he needed Christ, and others simply said that he was a liar, doing it all for attention. Just as he’d feared.

When he’d scrolled down to the bottom, he saw a particular comment that stood out to him more than the rest. The user had no profile picture and the name was an unintelligible series of letters, numbers and symbols, but the question they asked seemed to jump out from the screen. It was simple and direct and seemed very earnest in what it was asking.

Now that you’ve seen the devil, do you believe in God?

It made him look away from his computer and out the window. Kids played on the streets with their scooters and their push bikes. Planted suburban trees swayed about in the gentle breeze. He sat there for hours while thinking deep on that question.

After the sun fell below the horizon, he stood up from his desk and grabbed the tools he required.

END

Statement:

This was originally a script for a short film with Jamie’s monologue being a voice over that served as a prologue and an epilogue. I didn’t quite have the budget or resources to pull it off, but I liked the concept so much that I turned it into a short story and added a certain amount of philosophical layering that you can only really achieve with prose. Proud of this one. I hope you enjoy.

What to expect:

Hal is on the search for his brother who has left an ominous note and disappeared entirely. There is only one place he could’ve gone. The home of their shared trauma. The home of The Banished.

He could not let his brother perish into the night. Not before his years. Hal pulled his keys from the ignition and was deathly afraid of what the silence would bring, a reminder of why he’d driven all this way. Outside his foggy windows lay an ominous, shadow-cloaked building that had once been a center of life and progress, but was now abandoned. It towered over Hal’s small station wagon and dominated his view like a dark monolith standing in the center of hell itself. He knew from experience, though, that the true hell lay within. He shivered, not from the cold, but at the memories that lurked in the back of his mind.

He felt so small beneath this building in the dead of night. He felt even smaller as the past loomed over him, threatening to enter conscious thought and confront his sanity. His hands clamped the steering wheel and the scent of rotten death entered his nostrils. A mirage from his past.

He grabbed his brother’s letter from where it sat on the passenger seat and read it for the hundredth time.

Hello everyone,

None of you ever did wrong by me, and if you did, then I have forgiven you. I’m not leaving this note because I am unhappy with the people in my life, but simply because I am unhappy with life itself. I won’t tell you where I’m going because I truly don’t want to be found. This will be the last you hear from me. I would appreciate it if you played my favorite song at my funeral. Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand. I also understand if you don’t think I deserve any kind of tribute after all the pain I’ve caused you.

Oh, and Hal, we share troubled memories, but I seem to have been troubled more than you. I’m not resentful. Good luck with your life, brother. I’m proud of you.

Don’t grieve me too long. There are worse things than death in this world. I would know.

Goodbye everyone. Goodbye world.

Love, Michael.

He looked out at the earie research facility beyond. Hallow springs. The home of their shared trauma. He rubbed his tight facial muscles with uncomfortably sweaty hands, trying to release the snowball of stress brewing between his ears. Flipping down his face mirror, he found an anxious face looking back at him. Dark grey bags hung under his bloodshot eyes. He wanted nothing more than to smoke a cigarette to relieve this crushing cocktail of fatigue and anxiety. He didn’t.

He opened the car door and stood out into the crisp, cool air of pre-dawn darkness. Misty air blow from his blue lips as he slammed the door shut with a thunk that sounded like lightning in the silent night. He walked around the back of the car and opened the boot. Inside was a torch and a crowbar. The former was for the intense darkness that dwelt in the monolith ahead. The latter…

A muffled shriek sounded from far ahead. It was barely audible, but Hal’s senses were heightened on a night like this, so it might as well have been right in his ear. Skin crawling, he grabbed the torch and crowbar with silent haste.

Bling.

He had slammed the boot shut and locked the car when a sound came from his pocket. He checked his phone, knowing who it would be. Mum was worried about Michael and wanted to know if Hal had found him yet. His first instinct was to reply with an eagerness that he had been the one to finally solve the letter, the ultimate savior. He didn’t.

The situation needed room to breathe if Michael was going to come around. He put the phone back in his pocket and walked towards the tall gate. He was trying not to hear the deafening silence.

He had to climb the gates. They’d been locked for years, secured with a padlock and a hardy chain in the government’s hasty attempt to cover up the abominable research they had done here.

He landed on the other side with a thunk that shook him through his legs and into his core. Before him stood the Hallow Spring’s research facility. The road continued under the gate and led towards the main building. He walked down the road, shining his flashlight from side to side, inspecting the modest accommodation where the researchers had once stayed. Small, square buildings backed by the seemingly endless dark forest of the Australian countryside. Even the trees seemed small in the foothills of this dark palace ahead. He wasn’t sure if that was because of the facility’s actual size, or because of it’s larger than life history.

There was no wind here, only still, cold air that felt dead. The Accom buildings also had a distinct lack of life that crept under Hal’s skin and took his mind to dark places on what had happened here. To those who hadn’t left soon enough. It was likely the same thing that had drawn Michael here on this night. On his own dreadful mission.

At the end of the road was the facility proper, a faceless entity that conquered Hal’s view like some cursed castle of the underworld. His torch offered a singular refuge from the black void of the night as it guided him towards a set of vine-infested steps made of grey brick. Atop the small staircase, Hal found himself at the base of the facility.

It had the gothic feel of buildings from the turn of the century, architecture now extinct, with a mean-looking gargoyle perched atop its roof. Hal shone his flashlight to inspect the inanimate creature more thoroughly, but decided its eyes were too alive and aware for his liking. He turned the flashlight away. Not too fast, of course. Couldn’t let it know he was scared.

He brought his attention to the large wooden door in front of him and noticed that it was sealed with yet another thick chain and padlock.

For a moment, he was a boy again, standing before this very same door. His brother stood next to him.

“We shouldn’t be here,” said Hal. “We should go home.”

“We can’t give up now. We have to be brave. He can’t have gone far.”

He pushed the memory away and focused on the task at hand. Michael most certainly hadn’t gotten through this door, padlock and all, but there was another way to get in. One they had both taken before.

He crept around the side of the building, where he found the thick wooden trapdoors that marked the entrance to the facility’s most infamous attraction. The tunnels.

The birthplace of horrors previously unknown before their conception. Hal stood at its doors, about to dive into the hell that waited for him. He reached down and slid the latch across, and then pulled both panels open one by one. What lay beneath was a concrete stairway leading under the facility. On either wall were cobwebs, and when Hal flashed his torch to the bottom, he saw the largest rat he’d ever seen scurry away into the shadows.

Another memory flashed in his mind. He was with his brother again, staring down into the tunnels. They called out into the crushing darkness below.

“Snickers?”

“Snickers, are you there?”

Even as an adult, Hall felt his heart rate rise at the thought of entering. He felt all the same sensations he had that night as a kid. He took a deep breath and walked willingly into the belly of the beast in search of his brother. The start of an odyssey into the depths of despair and depravity.

He descended the brick staircase and entered the tunnels, guided only by the light he carried. He held the crowbar with his other hand. Firm grip. When he got to the bottom, he shone his torch at the walls on either side of him, where it illuminated old and ominous graffiti. Strange marks and symbols that he could not decipher, likely from addicts or homeless seeking refuge from the law, or perhaps thrill seekers, unable to resist the dark glory of Hallow Springs.

Everything about Hallow Springs was disturbing, illegal, and a downright feast for any fan of the mysterious. He and Michael knew that better than anyone.

He trekked further through the soulless brick hallways, unsure if he should yell out or search silently. It really depended on how far Michael had gone and how long he’d been here. Both questions were impossible to answer, and so Hal continued without a sound, ignoring the horrifying possibility that his brother’s mission had succeeded.

He searched old closets and spare storage rooms filled with useless commodities. He was careful not to bang and clatter, closing every door quietly as he could. One door made a screech that dragged on far too long, making Hal bite his lip with anxiety. He continued when he was certain nothing was about to pounce from the shadows.

He came across a hallway with numbered rooms on either side. He gently pushed open the doors, one by one, and whispered inside for his brother. Each room had two identical beds and two identical desks.

No Michael.

In one room, he found a piece of paper lying on the floor. Fingerprints of blood. Hal leaned his crowbar against the door frame and picked up the piece of paper.

Patient no 9:

Female, 8 years.

Close relationship with father.

Interests include ballet and choir.

Healthy joints.

Neurotypical.

Responding well to tests.

Blood type: O-

He looked up from the note and shone his torch through the room, finding both beds stained with blood. An overwhelming sense of wrongness washed through him and made him shiver. He dropped the paper and picked up his crowbar before closing the door behind him, banishing stray thoughts of what might have happened to this poor girl and her father.

Something cracked beneath his feet. He winced and lifted his foot where he found a smashed needle beneath it. With a sigh of relief, he placed his foot back on the ground beside it.

Another crunching sound.

This time from down the hall, back the way he came.

Hal’s mouth went dry.

He spun around, and what he saw made him nearly drop the torch from shock. Another man was crouching only a few meters away from him. He’d been hiding in the shadows but was now completely illuminated by Hal’s flashlight.

He wore tattered overalls and had an unkept grey beard coupled with hair of the same colour. He cowered from the light and made strange whimpering sounds that caused Hal both pity and disgust. Overall, the man’s body language was unthreatening, and Hal felt his anxiety recede. He was no longer potential prey. Simply an observer of this timid creature.?

“Are you ok?” He asked. The man didn’t respond, neither by voice nor by any indication that he had even heard the question. Instead, he crawled towards the broken needle and reached out his hand. He stifled through the shards of broken glass and didn’t seem to notice that he was brushing against Hal’s leg like a city pigeon intent on food.

Hal backed away instantly. Not just from the unwanted physical touch but also from the putrid smell emanating from the man.

After a few moments, the man seemed unsatisfied with the remains of the needle and its liquid, and he let out a frustrated groan, returning to the shadows from where he came.

Hal shone his light so he could watch the man disappear around the corner and be sure he was safe to turn his back and walk on.

The man stopped in his tracks, and what Hal saw next made him cold all over.

A pale, white hand with claws reached out from around the corner.

It petted the old man on the head.

Hal turned off his flashlight, plunging his world into darkness. He found himself planted in place as if two nails had been driven into his feet. He cursed silently and unpleasant memories seep in through cracks in his mind.

The boys had finally found Snickers. Found him being eaten alive by a pale man who sat in a dark closet. The dog’s squeals were cut off by a vicious crunch that echoed in those dark confines. The man looked up at them with his eyes painted in fear. That fear turned to hunger, and that hunger gave way to a more…predatory gaze.

He wanted to curse Michael for bringing him here, both now and all those years ago. He didn’t.

He took a deep breath and summoned the courage to walk on. He took slow and thoughtful steps, feeling at the narrow walls with his knuckles while his hands still held the torch and crowbar. Before long, he was around a few more corners of this endless maze and was able to turn on his flashlight once more. He continued into the shadows like they were filled with beautiful sirens calling for him to join them in the emptiness. Except now, he remembered the shadows were not empty at all.

Hal stopped dead in his tracks when he came to a door with a sign that read Do not enter. Certain death.

The door had been left slightly open, giving rise to an array of dark possibilities.

No memories invaded his mind, for they hadn’t made it this far as children, but his mind raced with anxiety about a certainly unpleasant future.

In a moment of forced bravery, he pushed the door open and cringed at the painful screech it made as it moved through its rusty hinges. He aimed his torch, and his heart sank at what he saw. At the bottom of yet another long and arduous staircase, in the depths of cob-web-infested hell, sat his brother Machael. He held his hands in front of his face to block the light.

“Michael!” Hall hissed. “It’s me. Hal. We need to leave. It’s not safe here!”

Michael didn’t respond, turning his gaze back down to the floor. Hal cursed under his breath. The steps below him felt like the stairway to hell itself, and the room had a disturbing, rotten scent. Hal went to speak again, but heard something that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand tall. A blood-curdling screech echoed through the hallways behind him like a banshee’s cry. Heart racing, he hissed at Michael again.

“I’m not messing around! We need to leave now! They’re going to kill us.”

Michael looked up and spoke.

“You shouldn’t have come. No one who gets this far leaves.”

Hal felt himself shaking. He thought he heard distant footsteps, though his fearful mind was liable to deceive him. In another moment of forced bravery, he began his descent down the staircase, all the while hearing a nagging voice in his head. Do not enter. Certain death.

Each step he took shuffled dirt onto the next, and Hal felt his brother’s resentment grow stronger as he grew closer. There was a strange aura around him. A man who wanted to die.

After what felt like an eternity suspended in the dark abyss, he reached the final step where Michael sat.

He gasped.

His torch illuminated a sight ripped straight from an art gallery of Satan’s design. About twenty feet away, against a brick wall to his right, hung the skin of human faces on bolts like a clothing line. Beneath them was a knee-high pile of miniature skulls and furry dead skin, all in a pool of blood.

Amidst the dead rats was an array of belongings. Pieces of jewelry, hats, clothes, and most disturbingly...dog collars. He thought of snickers, making him feel like that scared child holding back tears. He looked down the hallway and found it stretching into dark infinity.

Hal gagged, not only from the sight but from the putrid scent of dead flesh. That gag turned into a wretch, which turned into his lunch on the floor.

Shaking, he spoke to his brother.

“How can you be down here with that, Michael? How can you be so miserable that this is where you choose to spend your final moments? I don’t understand.”

Michael looked up at him, apathy in his eyes.

“You don’t understand? Of course you don’t. You made it out that night. I was in here…” Michael stopped for a moment and massaged his temples the way he always did when unpleasant memories came up to the surface. “I was in here for three fucking days. You ran and you got away, but he caught me, Hal. He caught me.”

Hal found himself consumed by shame. He knew that it wasn’t truly his fault, but shame seemed to defy all logic.

“I know,” he said, nearly choking on the words. “I’m sorry.”

Images flashed in Hal’s mind. He was running down a dark corridor. Michael tripped and fell beside him. Hal kept running. He heard a blood-curdling shriek as his brother was dragged away into the shadows.

“It’s ok, Hal. You were a kid. I would’ve kept running too if it were the other way around. But it wasn’t the other way around. He dragged me away and brought me to the others. Some kind of family. I thought they were going to kill me, but no…” He kept on massaging his temples. “I was their pet. I’ve never stopped feeling that way. For my whole life since then. No matter what I take or drink to drown it out. My body may have escaped that night, but my mind has stayed trapped. I figured it would be fitting to bring it full circle.”

His voice seemed devoid of stress or pain. Withdrawn and detached.

Despite a racing heart and an undeniable eagerness to be far away from this claustrophobic dungeon, Hal sat down and placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder.

“Michael,” he said. “You have a family of people who love and support you. They’re worried about you. You don’t need to do this.” It sounded plain and generic, and he felt like an asshole, but he didn’t know what else to say.

“That’s not the problem, Hal. It’s got nothing to do with how my life looks from the outside. It’s the inside that’s broken. Everyone else might support me, but my brain doesn’t. My brain is against me, Hal. This place turned it against me. I accepted that a long time ago.”

He turned to look Hal in the eyes for the first time all night.

“It’s ok,” he said. “You don’t have to fight for me anymore.”

Much like his voice, there was shockingly little pain in Michael’s eyes. In fact, they seemed a lot saner than the ones Hal had seen in the car mirror earlier.

A scuffle came from the darkness.

Hal twitched, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. It came from down the hallway, and for a moment Hal thought he heard someone whispering in the shadows. He shone his torch but found nothing. They were five minutes away from sharing fates with that poor homeless man in the tunnels, and likely those poor souls hung on the wall.

“We really need to get out of here, Michael. I think they’ve noticed we’re here.”

Michael looked at his brother with a blank stare.

“That’s the plan.”

Hal was hit with a sudden rush of anger that jolted him to his feet.

“That’s enough!” he hissed, conscious that too much sound could be lethal. “You think I don’t wish every day that it was me who got left behind instead of you! You think I don’t carry guilt or shame?! I’ve had to watch our whole lives while you drink yourself away because of that night! You can’t just throw it all away. I won’t let you!”

As soon as he stopped speaking, he noticed the child standing in the hallway.

He froze, and by the look on Michael’s face, he saw her too.

She stood alone, wearing a pink fairy skirt, marked with blood. Upon her feet were red ballet shoes, worn thin from extensive use. Her skin was bone white, and her eyes had a grey fog that emanated no life. Tiny claws grew from her tiny fingers.

Hal couldn’t move, paralysed in the grip of existential dread, but his brother seemed disturbingly calm.

“Leave Hal. I don’t want to drag you into my hell. You can still live a good life.”

He had his eyes closed now and was sitting upright with his chest out, embracing his eternal fate.

“No, I won’t leave. Not without you. Come with me, Michael. You can live a good life too. We can’t let the past destroy us.”

He reached an open hand out to his brother, who seemed to sense its presence even with closed eyes. He opened them, and his face reeked of hesitation.

A cluttering sound on the floor.

Hal turned, expecting to find the child crawling like a spider with teeth bared or some unimaginable horror. What he saw instead was a unique kind of disturbing, but arguably more frightening than anything he could’ve imagined.

The girl was dancing ballet. Better put, she was attempting to dance. Imitating some long-lost passion that had once existed inside this tiny body before the evil of this world had snatched her up and called her its own.

The girl’s movements were forced and sluggish, and she repeatedly stumbled mid-spin or mid-stride. Worst of all, her mouth hung open and her sinewy throat muscles tensed with effort. From that mouth came a raspy, high-pitched melody that barely travelled through the dark underground. Her attempt at song was as horrifying as it was pitiful, and Hal found himself frozen in a trance that mirrored those two emotions.

It took a harsh whisper from his brother to break him free.

“Just leave me, Hal! There’s still time.”

But Michael was wrong. There was no time.

A pale, clawed hand grabbed Hal’s shoulder. He thrashed violently, slipped, and fell to the hard, concrete floor. The crowbar fell to his right and the flashlight to his left, its light shining down the hallway and illuminating the child. She was on all fours now, making inhuman sounds that echoed in the tight confines of this godforsaken dungeon.

Hal went to grab the flashlight, but felt the crushing force of a boot slam onto his wrist. He cried out in pain but was interrupted by a hissing sound that came from the silhouetted figure standing above him, making him halt his cries in submission.

He could not see this creature, in the suffocating darkness, but he could smell its vile breath.

“Who are you?” Hal asked, trying to be demanding.

It came out as a sorry beg.

For a moment, there was no response, and Hal prayed to a god he didn’t believe in that this was all a dream.

God answered him, but it wasn’t the answer he was looking for, and it came from the mouth of the creature standing over him.

“I want to know what it’s like to be a human.”

Its voice was throaty, painful, and it struggled to project. It sounded like glass being ground by stone.

“I was meant to be human. Maybe… maybe if I could wear your skin, I could feel it. Maybe your skin will be different from the rest.”

Hal’s blood went cold. In that dark basement, locked away from the world like a mummy in its coffin, he had become a prey animal. He was simply a means to an end for this creature. It craved something he could not give, and would take it nonetheless.

No longer did he question if this was real, nor did he hope otherwise. Strangely, the verge of death made Hal feel more alive than ever.

His brother must have felt it too, because the creature hissed in pain as it was tackled to the floor. Hal spent a moment frozen with shock before grabbing the flashlight and jumping to his feet. He saw his brother struggling to stand and he reached out his free hand to stabilise the man. Forget the crowbar. They were both a mess of heavy breathing and uncoordinated movements, fleeing up the stairs.

At the top, Hal heard a whimpering sound from down in the dark. Against better judgment, he aimed the flashlight down into that dark, void-like pit, morbidly curious to see the creature below. He only saw it for a moment before Michael pulled him away, but the sight of it made his heart stop.

Upon the creature was a cloak of human flesh, covering all but its empty grey eyes, mouth, and those distinct pale hands. It hung from the creature’s thin frame like a baggy overall with a makeshift mask. A desperate attempt from a desperate creature to clutch at what life had once offered but had been brutally stripped away. It glared at Hal and Michael with envious eyes as they retreated through this labyrinth of hell.

They ran through the crushing darkness of the tunnels, guided by Hal’s flashlight. Michael clung to his brother’s arm and let him lead them to safety. Once or twice, they heard the scurrying of small footsteps and the terrible choking screams of the child. It was chasing after them. Not easily persuaded like daddy, it seems.

They approached the stair case and saw light peeking through the top of the trap door.

Dawn.

In a heap of exhaustion, they crawled up the stairs. Michael got to the top first and reached an arm out to Hal, who grabbed it and pulled himself into the light. Hal took one last look down into the tunnels, feeling his skin crawl at he saw. The little girl wasn’t alone anymore. Not by a long shot. At the corners of the room, where the light pushed back at the tendrils of the desperate dark, more of these creatures hid in the shadows. They were all pale-skinned and spindly, looking up at Hal with a deep longing. He couldn’t help but feel pity as they cowered from the light. A mix of men and women ranging from children to middle-aged.

He met eyes with one of them and found a shocking reflection of his own likeness. Another memory slipped through the cracks in his mental armor, more ancient than the others.

He was lying in bed and looking up at figures in white. He heard mum sobbing somewhere behind him. He was younger this time. About six. He heard the people in white whispering of his promising health.

He pushed the memory away. It was no longer welcome in his mind. He shut the trap door and closed the latch, leaving it all behind in Hallow Springs. The land where the banished lie.

They stumbled no further than ten meters before collapsing to the grass in a heap of sweat and exhaustion. They lay there for a time, looking up at the crisp morning sky and letting its light rejuvenate them. It wasn’t until Hal could see the day again that he felt how poisonous the dark had been. Still, he found himself thinking of those creatures. He thought of the mask of skin that the little girl’s father had worn. Only now, free from the grips of life or death, did Hal recognised that the mask had been made from the skin of a familiar face. The homeless man from the tunnels. Poor, sorry man.

Would Michael have shared the same fate if Hal had never come? Would Hal share that fate if Michael hadn’t tackled that creature? The horror of both thoughts made him shudder deep in his bones. He shuddered also for the inhabitants of Hallow Springs. Shuddered for who they had once been, and for the hell they now lived in.

He turned to his brother and felt joy at what he saw. Michael had a smile on his face.

“The light feels incredible,” he said. His eyes were closed, and his face had a look of peaceful bliss. They lay there for a time, basking in the sun.

Slowly but surely, they helped each other up and began the trek back to Hal’s car. They made each other laugh with childhood memories, and spoke with pity and sadness about what they had just seen. They didn’t mention the time Michael had spent in the tunnels as a kid. There would be time enough for that in the future. For now, they reveled in the joy of their small victory.

Hal eventually worked up the courage to ask his brother why he had changed his mind. That made Michael pause, and for a moment, Hal was worried he had asked too soon.

Then Michael spoke.

“Something about seeing them again after all these years. I thought they would be the mindless monsters I saw them as when I was a kid. Predators ready to carry me into the long sleep. I thought maybe they’d even remember me…”

He looked into the distance, lost in thought. Sunlight peaked over the distant tree line and it hit his eyes in a way that illuminated the deep consciousness that lay behind them. He spoke again, certainty in his voice.

“If they can fight so hard to be human, then why am I throwing it away? Even though it can be hard sometimes, it doesn’t mean it’s worthless.”

Hal nodded.

“I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

They kept walking, and silence hung in the air. It was no longer a silence that begged to be filled, but a peaceful one, content with the absence of sound.

Eventually, Michael spoke again.

“You know what’s really messed up about all this?”

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t come here to kill myself. I came here to join them. To share in their wallowing”

They climbed the fence, pushing through the fatigue of their aching muscles, and hobbled into the car, where they collapsed onto the seats. After a few minutes of staring into space and nearly falling asleep, Hal pinched himself awake and started the car. A familiar song played on the radio. The song Michael had wanted played at his funeral.

Take Me Out, by Franz Ferdinand. Today, that song had a new purpose.

Mischievous grins spread across the men’s faces, and their energy suddenly became alive. They drove away, into the new dawn, and they could no longer hear that deafening silence.

END